13 December 2009

Just a minor update to Sonic Extractor 3&K Mix, to version 1.2. It now has the ability to view the original Sonic 3 alone object layouts.

Sonic 3 and Sonic & Knuckles were originally intended to be one epic 32 megabit cartridge (according to Yuji Naka), but the game was split in half, and the first few levels were released early as Sonic 3.

By the time Sonic & Knuckles was released, Sonic Team felt like making a few changes to the zone layouts. When Sonic & Knuckles is locked on to Sonic 3, the 6 zones from Sonic 3 are tweaked a bit - sometimes for general ease of play, other times specifically for Knuckles and his new abilities.

Unfortunately, the object layout data for these two games, locked together or not, is read directly from the ROM, not the RAM. Therefore, Sonic Extractor, which uses savestates to map the zones, has to already know the object layout data. It's built in to the programme, and can't be changed.

This was a problem, though, when trying to map Sonic 3 alone levels with the unrevised object layouts. No matter what state you used, Sonic Extractor would blithely fill the level using the modified Sonic & Knuckles object data!

Version 1.2 corrects this problem. The user is now given a choice which version of the zone to view. Now anyone with a taste for minutiae can export both versions of each zone, and get a comprehensive comparison of the changes for the first time!